[ILUG] Newbie Question: Installing software on RH

[Dave Neary]

I actually had similar (practical and philosophical) problems with rpms
set up to install everything, even post-installation, in /usr. I've been
told that the scheme conforms (rather tenuously) to the file system
standard....but I disagree. Anyway, I've wound up in a situation where I
install everything I compile from source in /usr/local, and only binary
RPMs in /usr.

My suggestion would be....

Change fstab to mount /usr/local at /usr, and /usr as /usr/local - then
copy everything from /usr/local back to /usr. Then (to further use space),
clean /usr/local (the associated device, I mean), and copy /usr/src to it.
Then mount /usr/local as /usr/src. That, after compiling a kernel, should
be in the region of 250M. Then set up the standard directories in what
used to be /usr/local (which is now not a device).

The fstab would then look more like
> >     /dev/hda9 398124 364906 12657 97% /usr/src
> >     /dev/hda8 991000 32 939765 0% /usr
and the percentages would be different. It';s a bit tricky, but you should
have a duplicate of everything before you delete stuff....it's a little
complicated, but it should work.

Cheers,
Dave.

On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, Phil wrote:

> Justin MacCarthy's [macarthy at iol.ie] 32 lines of dribble included:
> > Hi people,
> > 
> > I have a question about the installation of software. I'm running RH6.* and
> > so far using rpm to install software ... rpm -ivh <package>.rpm as root.
> > 
> > However /usr is becoming full (97%) whereas  /usr/local is empty so
> > obviously this is a problem. I'm pretty new to Linux so be gentle.
> > 
> > So my question is: What should my general strategy for installing new
> > software ???
> > I'm a little confused :-)
> > 
> > 
> > df
> >     Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
> >      /dev/hda1 66333 50719 12189 81% /
> >     /dev/hda7 50717 2395 45703 5% /boot
> >     /dev/hda5 1162695 20651 1081969 2% /home
> >     /dev/hda10 242015 6945 222573 3% /var
> Nearly all "new" software will be installed into /usr/local (or at least
> software which is installed locally, hence the name)
> It is generally a convention that software in /usr/local/ is accessible by
> users of your box.
> There is a filesystem heirarchy standard[1] which is probably the best thing to
> follow. /usr seems a little full to me (70-80 per cent would probably be best)
> but you could still get by, by installing everything into /usr/local/
> Also if this box of yours is to be used at home, /home seems a little big and
> you might be better off dedicating some of that space to your /usr and/or
> /usr/local system.
> Philip.
> [1] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html
> 
> -- 
> Irish Linux Users' Group: ilug at linux.ie
> http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug for (un)subscription information.
> List maintainer: listmaster at linux.ie
> 

  .-------------------------------------.
 /          David Neary,                 \
|     E-Mail dneary at eircom.net            |
|    Fax (int access)-353-1-872-0654      |
 \  Phone (int access)-353-1-872-0654    /
  `-------------------------------------'